Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [96]
Debbie was already leaning over the display.
‘A source, two hours ago. It arrived in space, er, and it went back up to the same point. It...’
‘Just read it out,’ he suggested.
She read out the numbers the display was showing. She could hear the Doctor scratching them down.
‘It’s still there,’ the Doctor said, puzzled.
* * *
‘How many years has it been?’ Miranda asked.
The woman in black, the Deputy, had taken her place behind her master. Miranda studied Ferran’s face. It was covered in lines now, and those cheekbones of his had given way to fat. She glanced at his wrist. He was still wearing his computer bracelet, but even that was looking past its best now.
‘Twenty,’ he snapped. ‘Three for you, twenty for me. You have aged rather better than I have. You knew I’d come, didn’t you?’
‘No. I thought I was rid of you.’ Ferran looked confused. ‘You must have known,’ Miranda said.
‘We were lovers,’ Ferran told her.
Miranda chuckled. ‘We nearly were,’ she corrected him. ‘But so what?’
Ferran’s face twitched, as if he was desperately trying to keep control. ‘I travelled a million years to see you again.’
‘You must have known I wouldn’t have come willingly. Otherwise why would you have abducted me instead of just talking to me?’
‘I thought you would be pleased,’ Ferran insisted, his voice almost a whine.
Miranda realised she should have been angry, but she had no feelings at all, just a blank where her feelings should have been. She looked at the Deputy – who wore the same dead expression Miranda’s face must have. ‘We’re heading back to your time, aren’t we?’
‘Not yet. This ship is magnificent, but we’ve developed a fault in the time engine. The self-repair circuits have it under control. We will return to our native time in three Earth days. You are probably wondering how I tracked you down.’
Miranda was a little embarrassed to realise it hadn’t even occurred to her.
‘Cate,’ Ferran prompted. So the Deputy’s name was Cate.
The Deputy stepped forward and handed Miranda a golden circlet, indicating that she should put it on her head.
Miranda slid it into place, and felt whispering in her mind.
‘What does this do?’ she asked.
‘Enhances natural telepathy – allows you to operate some of our machines.’
The wall behind him became a writhing mass. A man and a woman in bed. There was an earnest voiceover, a man speaking German.
She watched for a moment, wondering why he was showing her this, until she realised the woman looked like her – or had been made to: the blonde hair was a wig, the face was slightly more angular. The man was her German tourist, or – again – an actor who looked like an idealised version of him. The room was his hotel room, the one she’d just left. But the layout was all wrong, the decoration too elaborate, too ethnic, too beautifully lit. There hadn’t been the sitar playing when she’d been there.
‘That’s not me,’ she said.
It was the night the Berlin Wall fell, the voiceover was saying.
Ferran watched the couple, spellbound. Cate had her back to the screen. ‘Your friend won the Best Foreign Non-Interactive Film Oscar for this in 2017. He wrote and directed it. It’s autobiographical, about how the major events of his life happened on historically significant dates. He was born the day the Beatles split up. It ends with him marrying his wife on the day Princess Diana died.’
‘Is that Jodie Foster?’ Miranda asked. A number of people had said she looked a bit like her.
‘It’s her daughter,’ the Deputy replied without hesitating.
The narrator never saw Miranda again, he told his audience, as, on the screen, they held each other close, radiant, trying to catch their breath. He had looked for her, he said, but all anyone would talk about was the flying saucer the locals said they’d seen that morning. And she was gone from his life, but he would never forget her.
‘The director died,’ Ferran said, without any sense of regret. ‘He left a wife and three sons. Nothing of any