Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [107]
‘I couldn’t say, Lady Miranda.’
The door slid open and Ferran stepped through, unannounced.
‘It is time to continue the tour of the ship,’ he told Miranda. They had talked about it before, as they’d walked back from the flight deck. ‘We will start at the mapping room.’
Miranda wiped the last tear from her eye and stood, tugging her tunic into shape. ‘I’m ready.’
Ferran turned and left, and Miranda strode out after him. Once again, the Deputy followed a few steps behind them.
‘The ship is four kilometres long. I can walk that far, how about you?’
Ferran was already sweating. ‘There are travel tubes.’
The nearest was directly opposite the door to her room. The normal doors were roughly rectangular (although a little wider at the bottom), but the travel-tube door was circular, and they had to step over a ledge to get in. Once inside, Miranda looked around what resembled a futuristic London Tube carriage, except without windows or anything else to break the monotony of the smooth copper walls. Ferran touched a control and the door hissed shut behind them and the carriage started moving.
The whole process was silent, and it was difficult to judge the speed. The ride was very smooth – smoother than standing in a lift, for example.
Ferran kept his eye on Miranda the whole time. He was on edge. Was he expecting her to pounce on him, or something? Or was he about to pounce on her?
Miranda was beginning to feel again – her emotions were slowly returning, as if her batteries were recharging. At first she’d only felt numb, but she was getting angry now. She’d beaten Ferran last time, she reminded herself. She’d killed his last Deputy. He was on home ground, now, but that just meant he would be getting complacent. She could defeat him.
‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Why did you come back for me?’
‘Because I love you,’ he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
‘And the real reason? It’s because I’m the heir to the throne, isn’t it? You want to marry me and become Emperor.’
‘Nominally,’ Cate began, ‘in some quarters at least, you’re the heir to the throne. Constitutionally, you’re the Empress of the entire universe.’
Despite the absurdity of it all, and knowing that she’d done nothing to deserve the honour, a part of Miranda felt very proud of that. In practice, of course, she’d barely held the under-seventeens swimming team together in the face of competition from exams and boys, so the chances of her keeping a galactic empire united seemed fairly remote.
Ferran laughed. ‘We fought a war to rid the universe of your family and their rule. There might be a few royalists out there, but I doubt it. No one was sorry to see your kind go. If I want to impose my authority, then this ship will be far more effective than your hereditary claims. But those matter to some people. I will marry you, to demonstrate my ownership of you, and your titles, nothing more.
‘How do you feel about that?’ Miranda asked the Deputy. It was easier to ask the question than answer it for herself.
Ferran turned and stroked his Deputy’s face. ‘She has no feelings one way or the other, do you, my dear? She obeys me. A job she does exceptionally well. Besides, she knows that marriage to you will be very little more than symbolic.’
‘You treat her like an object,’ Miranda noted.
‘She is.’
‘She’s a human being.’
‘She most certainly is not.’
‘She’s a... person.’
‘You don’t recognise her, do you? Look at her. Let her take a good look, Cate, my dear.’
Cate stood still.
Miranda looked into the face. The blue eyes. She was in her mid-thirties... but there was something about her face. Ever since she’d first seen the Deputy something about her had bothered Miranda.
‘ “Cate” is short for “duplicate”,’ Ferran explained. ‘She’s what you would call an android.’
Miranda took a step back, instinctively. Cate just didn’t look like an android, a built thing – there was no hint of it. She hadn’t even suspected that the Deputy was anything other than a person. Not a human being, but human-like, as she and Ferran were, a creature of