Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [41]
‘Can’t be more than an hour or so ago. He was in a bar around the corner.’
The man pointed. ‘With a young girl, a local. They had a meal and then left.
He seemed very excited, too’ The man smiled at the memory and described someone who could only be the Doctor.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where they went?’
‘Sorry.’ The man looked disappointed that he couldn’t help any more.
‘He’s alive!’ hissed Trix as the man walked away, glancing over his shoulder at them. ‘The Doctor’s alive – did you hear him?’
‘And well, apparently.’
All Trix could think of, though, was that now she wouldn’t have to spend hours trying to find a ship to take her back to Earth.
74
∗ ∗ ∗
Trove wasn’t used to things not working. He wasn’t used to malfunctions and mistakes. He particularly wasn’t used to his flycams failing.
Trove had high hopes for the Doctor: his instruments had picked up the arrival of his ship (although, curiously, he hadn’t actually been able to pinpoint where it had landed with any great accuracy), and after releasing half dozen or so of his precious flycams, he’d witnessed the Doctor’s confused and stumbling arrival at the Palace. Tannalis had been irritatingly reluctant to have the Doctor imprisoned, pointing out that not only was it unconstitutional, but also immoral – but had eventually relented when Trove had pointed out that his incarceration was simply to buy time for Trove to recharge and program a flycam to follow him. Grumbling, Tannalis had given the order. Trove had calibrated the flycam and guided it into the Doctor’s room – where the offworlder had sat sullenly, muttering to himself about someone called ‘R.D. Laing’ and open doors – and then sat back to watch the Doctor escape. Of course, Trove had realised, it was always possible that the Doctor would simply sit there until someone came to ‘question him’. But Trove prided himself on being a good judge of character, and this Doctor didn’t seem the sort of man to wait for fate to come to him.
He was proved right. Within ten minutes of being left alone, the Doctor had stretched, stood up and casually strolled to the door. With the flycam’s pattern recognition software fully trained and its battery topped up, Trove could just sit back and watch as the camera relayed every step of the offworlder’s escape from the Palace. Of course, he’d sent a couple of the Guard to chase him: Trove didn’t want the Doctor’s escape to appear too easy.
And now Trove was kicking himself for assuming that the Doctor’s awareness and reactions were human-standard. They clearly weren’t: the last images transmitted from the flycam had been of the Doctor, viewed from above, waving his hand around. The next moment there was a pale blur on the screen in front of him and the camera’s telemetry went dead. It was, of course, possible that some other native animal or insect had spotted the cam and decided that it would make a tasty snack, but the devices emitted a high frequency sonic pulse as well as an electromagnetic field that, usually, would be enough to deter most casual predators.
He sat back and folded his arms, listening to the sounds of the builders and engineers in the courtyard constructing the stage. Trove hoped that his mission here would be completed before then: with the offer that he’d made to the Imperator, he was quietly confident that no effort would be spared to help him find his prize.
∗ ∗ ∗
75
‘Farine!’ hissed Sensimi, stepping out of the shadows and making her maid jump. She almost dropped the big, covered basket of dirty washing that she carried. When Farine saw it was only Sensimi, she took a deep breath, on the point of telling the princess not to do that again. But of course she didn’t.
Nerves and tempers were as frayed as ever around the Palace at the moment, and the last thing Farine wanted was to lose her job. She quite liked Sensimi
– well, compared to her family she was an angel – but was under no illusions about the brittleness