Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [95]
‘He should have let me keep the gun,’ she grunted.
‘What?’ Daniel was crouched behind the next pillar, about six feet in front of the building’s front door. His eyes were wide and wet. Roz knew the effects of shock when she saw them.
‘The Doctor. He took the gun off me when I tried to kill...’
She tailed off. A loose memory; a public information poster that had been stapled to the wall of her Adjudicator lodge, twelve hundred years into the future. A faceless cartoon shadow clutching a vibroknife, the blade stained a dramatic red. Above it, the words: STAY ALERT AT ALL TIMES.
MOST MURDERS ARE COMMITTED BY SOMEONE
YOU KNOW.
And underneath, some joker had scrawled: YES. HIS
NAME’S PHIL.
A slither-cap plinked against the front of the bank, detonated, and covered the building in a vomit-coloured bionetic soup that slid across the brickwork looking for living tissue to consume. Roz saw a small family of woodlice dissolving in the sludge. She reckoned she was out of the gunk’s range, but she could hear boots clunking above the sound of the storm. Forrester-2 was getting closer.
‘This is your last chance,’ said a voice much like Roz’s, and she found herself thinking how funny it sounded.
‘Surrender now and I’ll go easy on you.’
Roz remembered the poster again.
YES. HER NAME’S ROZ FORRESTER.
Something moved in her pouch. ‘Hell!’
She saw Daniel glance in her direction. ‘The amaranth,’ she said. ‘It’s started again. It must be the storm. It probably wants to rebuild everything this time.’ She nodded up at the sky.
There wasn’t any single word that could properly describe what was happening to the town, but ‘storm’ came closest.
Daniel looked blank. ‘Can it do that?’
‘No. Not all at once, anyway. But it’s giving it a damn good try. Where’s it getting its information from this time?’
‘Well, I tried to be nice,’ said Forrester-2. There was a burst of gunfire, the front of the bank buckling under flenser waves and slither-goop. Roz glanced at the door of the building. Too far away, and it was probably locked anyhow.
She’d be skinned before she could make it inside.
‘What do we do now?’ asked Daniel, flatly.
‘You have the standard six-second opportunity for prayer and reflection,’ called Forrester-2 as the columns began to give way. The amaranth started to howl. Roz clenched her teeth.
‘It never rains...’ she said. And then everything changed.
We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, and a happy New... oh, sod it.
The Carnival Queen was standing on top of a needle-sharp promontory that had, only seconds earlier, been a low sand-dune. Long and angular shadows – shadows of yellow light –
streaked across the desert, each one showing her in a different pose. Some made Chris feel strangely excited.
From down on the ground, she looked almost... godlike?
No.
Demonic?
Possibly.
He’d tried asking her about her fiendish plan to turn the universe inside-out, but most of what she’d told him had been vague and ambiguous. Yeah, no kidding. Apparently, it was the Age of Reason that had let her break down the barriers between her little shadow-world and the rest of creation. Earth stood poised ‘between Cacophony and Reason’, or something like that, and the accumulated fear and angst of the human race had acted like a kind of prayer, weakening the walls of her prison.
Was ‘prayer’ the word she’d used? Chris could have sworn he’d heard another word, spoken at the same time but with a different voice, and it had sounded like ‘seance’.
So her prison was opening up, forming crukking great cracks throughout Earth history. Holes into the darkness. New York in 1799, Canberra in 1926, Arizona in 2012 (which explained what had happened to Roz, Chris had realized, though he hadn’t yet worked up the courage to ask where she was now).
‘I still don’t get it,’ he’d said. ‘Why Earth? I know, because it was the Age