Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [49]
‘Ah,’ said Duquesne, flatly.
‘My guess is, there’s some kind of extra-dimensional thing at work here. It’s probably kidnapped Roz and the Doctor. It probably wants to take over the universe.’
Duquesne looked alarmed. ‘You sound very casual, Christopher.’
‘Do I? I dunno. After a while, it all seems kind of natural.’
He nodded to himself. ‘Anyway, whoever’s behind this, they’ll probably show themselves soon. There’s going to be a face-off. There always is.’
‘You no doubt know best,’ said Duquesne, without any apparent humour.
‘So, I think we should be armed. The only working weapons on board that I know about are in Roz’s quarters.
That means we’ll have to go through the parts of the ship where the life-support’s broken down, and that won’t be easy.’
They paused as a broken balustrade drifted past. Wolsey the cat sat perched on top of it, licking his backside as if the break-up of the TARDIS was unimportant compared to the state of his furry rear end.
‘I was going to ask you –’ began Cwej.
Interface felt its personality lurch and skip. In that moment, the data it had requested from the Matrix was pushed into its human-shaped memory, flooding the make-believe synapses.
The experiences of dead Time Lords, and of those few who had been touched by the Matrix while they still lived. Interface found itself developing new perspectives by the second.
Frame one. It was watching a film in a secret screening-room. The film was scratchy, in black and white. The camera had been unsteady. The film showed the interior of a warehouse, where corpses of a hundred different species were suspended in plastic containers. Alien bodies riddled with bullets, disembodied organs sealed in transparent bags by their sides. A group of humans – in twentieth-century military outfits, Interface noted – were sealing up the body of something half-reptilian, half-piscine.
Frame two. Interface was in a room, surrounded by the twin scents of blood and ethanol, the area cluttered with primitive surgical tools. It was watching an autopsy, two men hacking into a bleached humanoid on a blood-flecked table.
The men were making notes; the body had two hearts and a respiratory bypass system, not to mention an enormous gaping wound in its right leg. They occasionally turned to Interface and asked questions.
What Time Lord had witnessed this, it wondered?
Frame three. Interface was in a darkened office, searching a filing cabinet by torchlight. It found itself flicking through documents labelled ‘ majestueux’ reading reports of monsters and anomalies, most of them dated between 1790 and 1840.
Two words kept reappearing throughout the reports, the name of the organization that had been involved in all of these operations.
Shadow Directory.
In a corridor on another level of the TARDIS, one of the roundels frowned.
‘– was that true, what you told me before?’ said Cwej.
‘About just, y’know, wandering into the TARDIS?’
Marielle Duquesne paused. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘It was not.
Your ship called me here. At least, it attracted me in a way I could not resist. Pardon me, Christopher. I am... embarrassed by such things.’
Interface watched her, observing the tiny tell-tale movements she made, revealing that she was still hiding something. The concept of body language was new to the software, but it wasn’t hard to get to grips with.
Secret societies, thought Interface. Shadow Directory. It wondered if it should tell Cwej, and if so, then how.
Something was happening in the town. Something big, and brutal, and unexpected. There were weird stories, rumours about violence and witchery. Daniel Tremayne didn’t know how he knew all that; he just felt it, like everything the town experienced had been filtered through his body first.