Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [16]
Let’s snort dead alien!’).
The gun had cost her everything she owned – which she had to admit was pretty damn cheap – plus a few odds and ends she’d taken from the house. It was a clumsy piece of machinery, even by eighteenth-century standards. ‘Army surplus’, she’d been told, a relic from the War of Independence. She’d spent some time practising out in the woods, using up most of what little ammunition she’d been able to afford, getting a feel for the weapon, learning how to fire the damned thing without being killed by the recoil.
She’d also spent some time hanging around the Lincoln house, an address that had taken her several days to worm out of the locals. There, she’d found the convenient little alleyway that opened up directly opposite the building, right by the church. The perfect site. Not only did the alley give her good cover, it also had an excellent view of the drawing– room window.
The clock in the church tower struck nine, listlessly, perhaps aware that no one cared about the time this close to Christmas.
No one was around on Paris Street. Roz Forrester crouched in the alley, slipped the gun out of her pouch, and prepared to shoot Samuel Lincoln.
2
A Fistful of Timelines
Daniel Tremayne was running. At last, he was running.
Saw the alleyways flash past, saw the lights on Paris Street turn into yellow smears, saw a corner where he’d once been attacked by a drunken priest and a store where he’d stolen a whole pineapple, slipping it under his coat-of-rags, thinking, they don’t even notice me when I’ve got something this size bulging out of my shirt. Daniel Tremayne, running through the places he’d been before, and all of them he recognized, and none of them made sense. It was like something –
– the thing hadn’t entered the basement, or even appeared in a magical puff of smoke. It had been born into Catcher’s house, kicking its way out of the very stuff of creation –
– like something had reached into his head and pulled away all the strings that held his memories together. People were on Eastern Walk, people who stared, people who noticed him. He thought about calling out to them, warning them about the thing that was filling up Catcher’s house, but his head was already full of the whispers, and there was no room in there for putting words together any more.
Saw that the stones of the street were closer to his face than they should have been. Didn’t think it mattered much. He kind-of-remembered feeling something under his foot, tripping up on some piece of garbage at the entrance to an alley. The pain that cracked across his forehead when he hit the ground might as well have been happening to someone else, and the splintering noise might as well have come from somewhere a hundred miles away.
Suddenly he could see a picture of dirt-shrouded men in a field of snow, and Daniel recognized it as a memory, knocked out of the back of his skull and into the space behind his eyes.
There was the sound of music, shot through with gunfire, like he was listening to the carnival at the end of the world.
– he’d seen a million futures, worlds held together by webs of machines, mapping out civilization as a tapestry of noughts and ones. Everything in the known universe, converted into the simplest of pulses, on-off on-off –
All the sounds and all the pictures had melted down into the noughts and the ones. There was nothing else, except for something big and black and empty, but Daniel Tremayne didn’t know the word ‘unconscious’ so he didn’t know what to call it.
Marielle Duquesne lashed out against the machine, jamming her fist into its cheek, and it was only when her knuckles failed to bleed that she knew she was dreaming. The cracks she’d made in the thing