Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [56]
THEM. NOW. . . FORGET ME.
No! shrieked Trix. You’re bloody kidding if you think that So, Trix thought as she set off down the alleyway, Fitz has got himself an invite to the Palace, has he? Well, he’s not the only one who can ingratiate himself with royalty.
Behind her, unnoticed in the darkened doorway of the shop, the ten-year-old boy that had once been called Joshua lay silent as his heart and lungs, no longer under the control of the Maker, struggled to remember how to work.
The pale light of the street silhouetted Trix, and for a moment, just before everything went dark and silent, Joshua wondered if it was Our Lady, come to take him home to Ma and Pa.
Out in the fields beyond the city walls, where the wreck of an alien space-craft still smouldered and crackled, Ake hadn’t moved. He knelt on the grass and stared into the distance, unseeing, unhearing. Unthinking.
The Doctor, seemingly ignorant of the biological laws which governed the ratio between the quantity of alcohol imbibed and the state of drunkenness 103
attained, was downing what was probably his tenth pint of beer, with no discernible effect. The two of them had moved from bar to bar, asking if anyone had seen two other offworlders. There had been one or two sightings, but nothing that seemed to lead anywhere. Calamee wondered whether they shouldn’t be out patrolling the streets, rather than standing around drinking.
The crowd which had gathered around the Doctor when he’d first produced his credit chip had dwindled (mainly, Calamee suspected, because the locals hadn’t been able to keep up with him, and had staggered off home to be sick or to sleep, or both). The woman who had been so enamoured of the Doctor had found herself another victim, and Calamee had started to feel a bit guilty about lying to her house-mother. No doubt Sierah would contact Craich’s house-father to confirm that Calamee was, indeed, staying there overnight.
But this wasn’t the first time she’d lied to Sierah about her whereabouts, and the most she could expect was a severe telling-off and the threat of a ground-ing. But she was canny enough to know how to pull the right faces, say the right things, to get it all forgotten within a day or two. She had home study for the next couple of days, so she wouldn’t be missed.
The barman was chatting to a customer who’d just arrived, his face all bright and eager, and judging by the ‘Really?’s and the ‘No!’s that the barman was giving back, something of great interest was being said. Calamee sidled up to the Doctor and shot a glance at the remains of his beer.
‘How do you do that?’ she asked.
‘What? Drink? Oh, it’s really very simp–’
‘You know what I mean. You should be unconscious by now. What is it?
Chemicals? Alien biology?’ She pulled her best little-girl face. ‘Tell me, please.’
‘Why d’you want to know?’
‘We might look backward here – hell, we are backward here. But we’re not totally out of touch with the rest of the galaxy. It’s like being a kid with her face pressed up against the window of the biggest, sickest sweetshop in town and watching all the others helping themselves while you’re stuck outside with a bag of peanuts. We know the kinds of stuff that other colony worlds have, other aliens. Nanotech, bod-mods, implants, cyberisation, AIs –
even intelligent clothes. It probably all seems so run-of-the-mill to you, zipping about space in your space yacht, talking to intelligent rocks, robots with multidimensional positronic brains. . . ’
She tailed off, aware of the look he was giving her.
‘Space yacht? Intelligent rocks?’ He grinned broadly. ‘You’ve been reading too many comics. But I’ll give you the robots with the multidimensional positronic brains. Very temperamental, they are.’
104
‘You know what I mean.’ She felt very tired and very young and very silly.
‘Take me with you,’ she said suddenly.
‘What?’
‘Take me with you. When you go. Please.’ Calamee realised she was gripping the arm of his jacket – rich, dark green velvet, so unlike