Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [10]
‘Uh,’ came Fitz’s decisive answer.
‘Good,’ said Trix, squinting into the shade of the bushes. ‘Can you get up?’
‘Uh,’ Fitz said firmly.
‘Well, get up then. Fitz – I think there’s something in the bushes! And don’t just say “Uh” again. Come on!’ She tugged at his collar, hoping that he’d take her hint.
‘Wha. . . ?’
‘We’ve got to find the Doctor, Fitz – or get back to the TARDIS.’
Fitz muttered something through a mouthful of grass and painfully levered himself into a kneeling position. The side of his face was imprinted with a pattern from the ground and Trix noticed that a patch of hair the size of a matchbox was missing from Fitz’s temple. But there was no blood there –
just a smooth, raw-looking patch of skin like you’d get after recovering from a burn. It make Trix feel a bit creeped out. She’d never been good with disfigurements and bodily injuries – although since she’d been with the Doctor and Fitz, her tolerance levels had risen considerably.
‘Fitz, your head – what happened?’
16
He fixed his gaze on her as well as he could, with eyes that seemed as determined as possible to go their own ways, and frowned.
She nodded. ‘I know. “Uh.” Can you stand?’
Fitz gave her an ‘Of course I can stand’ look, wobbled to his feet and promptly fell over backwards with a deep moan.
‘We don’t have time for slapstick – there’s something in those bushes. Is it the Doctor?’
‘Eh?’
She sighed. ‘Forget it – let’s get you back. Does the Doctor keep a first-aid kit or a spacey medical robot or magical heal-all pills or anything? Something like that ointment he gave to Guy?’
Fitz shook his head slowly, like someone coming out of a dream, and fixed her with a deep and puzzled frown.
‘That’s a no, then, is it?’ she sighed.
He coughed noisily, his hand flying to his chest as he doubled up.
‘C’mon, up you get,’ Trix said, realising that the floor was nowhere for an injured man to be sitting. Particularly if he was badly injured. She slipped her hands under his armpits in an attempt to lift him up, but he pushed her away as his coughing fit abated.
‘Where am I?’ he demanded unsteadily, staring at her. ‘And who the Dickens are you?’
Behind them, unheard, the air fizzed and crackled, like the sound of a billion champagne bubbles.
17
Chapter 3
‘Sticks, Trix?’
Imperatrix Alinti watched critically, as a bevy of butlers and servants swarmed across the Grand Hall, their arms laden with bolts of silver and gold fabric, banners and poles. She’d grown tired of arguing with her husband about the archaic way in which he’d insisted on decorating the Palace for his birthday celebrations, and had grumpily agreed to ‘maintain a sense of tradition’ about the whole affair.
If she’d had her way she’d have had the whole Palace decked out with optical projectors, lasers and tridee imagers. This insistence of Tannalis’s on tatty fabric ribbons draped all over the place was tacky, she felt, and sent out the wrong image of the Imperial Family to the country – never mind to the rest of Espero. She knew for a fact that the Prime Administrator in Anjon had spent a small fortune on offworld technology to mark his third inauguration – including an obscenely expensive short-range matter transmitter to have his whole parliament transported instantly to the celebrations. Now that was class, Alinti thought. That was style – particularly since the use of matter transmitters went specifically against High Catholic doctrine, since Pope Constanza had decreed that it was impossible to teleport a human soul.
The only concessions she’d been able to wheedle out of Tannalis so far were five battered old levicars purchased from Marselle (which he’d agreed to far too readily, thinking about it), and a commitment to having the diamond monolayer coating of the corner towers resurfaced. As she’d explained patiently to him, they could hardly go on calling it the ‘Crystal Palace’ in its current state. She blamed the government’s appropriation committees for skimp-ing on it the first time round: a decent coating job should last for centuries, not just a decade.