Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [99]
She looked at him levelly.
‘Is that emotion, Cate?’ he asked, ‘I thought your kind were above such things.’
‘As your Deputy, I have to raise my concerns about your strategy. I am just doing my job.’
Ferran smiled. ‘Of course you are. Now get dressed and go to our guest.’
* * *
Miranda thought about her father, and the message she had sent. She thought she had seen him standing in the road, looking just the same – except for a few grey hairs – but she had no way of knowing whether she’d just imagined it. Ferran had taken the circlet away with him, ushered the Deputy out and left Miranda alone for several hours.
She’d paced the room, discovered a bathroom (and worked out, she hoped, which one was the toilet and which one was the shower), the wardrobes full of clothes that had been tailored to fit her, and which items mounted on the walls were functional and which were decorative.
And she still didn’t have a plan.
She had three days. Three days minus however many hours it had been. She’d left her watch – a fifteenth birthday present from her father – on the bedside table of her German friend’s hotel room. Normally she had a good sense of what the time was, even without a watch, but she was obviously suffering from space lag, or whatever.
The sense of the time machine getting ready to depart was almost palpable to her. She could feel it, somewhere deep within the ship. A weird sense, vaguely familiar to her, comforting and primal as being held in a mother’s arms. Salmon must feel like this when they start swimming home.
What was Ferran planning?
He hadn’t said. He wasn’t planning to kill her, at least not just that – he could have done that hours ago. Or on the balcony of the hotel. Perhaps there was a state execution planned at the other end. A public occasion with ceremony and baying crowds. But that hadn’t been his style last time they’d met. Last time they’d met, of course, he’d gone from being Gold Blend bloke to intergalactic Nazi assassin and back again in the space of a day.
Finding herself. As the stock-market boom and property boom and credit boom all came to an end with the decade, a lot of the City types had been forced to give up their excesses and ambitions and optimism and to look within. Miranda had met a few of them in India, following the brand name and designer label as always, looking for the hippie trail and trying to pay for everything with a Gold Amex.
But she’d been looking within for over three years for some answers.
In a cave in Greece, a mystic had told her – for five dollars – that she was her father’s daughter and the answers lay within her.
That hadn’t helped in the slightest.
And she’d gone to India and found nothing. Now, of course, she’d been reminded exactly what she was – that she had two hearts, a blood type that wasn’t even blood, and one of the two highest IQs on the planet.
Miranda sat on the edge of the bed, trying to form a plan. But she couldn’t escape – even if she could reach a flying saucer, she couldn’t fly one. For the moment, her fate was in Ferran’s hands. The door hissed open without warning, and the Deputy, Cate, entered.
‘You are rested?’ she asked, with all the concern of a speak-your‐weight machine.
‘What will happen to me?’
‘It is not my place to say.’
‘Well, what can you tell me?’ Miranda asked. ‘Are there just the three of us on this ship?’
Cate glared at her, with a loathing it took a moment for Miranda to rationalise. Three’s a crowd, Miranda realised.
‘Prefect Ferran has a whole legion on this ship, and support staff and slaves. But, even then, we’ve not explored the whole ship.’
‘Explored the ship? Didn’t you build it?’
‘No, My Lady. It was a shipwreck.’
‘And it’s big. How big?’ Miranda asked.
‘The size of a city.’
Miranda shrugged. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Four kilometres long, a kilometre in diameter at either end. A thousand levels.’
‘Levels?’
‘Storeys. Floors.’
Miranda gulped.