Doctor Who_ Halflife - Mark Michalowski [64]
What the hell is wrong with you? he thought suddenly, angrily, and let go of Calamee’s hand. She turned sharply and checked that he was still following.
‘OK?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Fine.’
∗ ∗ ∗
116
If Trove had released one of his flycams into the night, and sent it straight up, high over the city and out into the countryside where the TARDIS had landed, he would have seen a strange but disturbing sight – a sight that would have made him rethink his plans and would have seen him leaving the Palace at the first opportunity.
Out beyond the city walls, where the acid glow of the streetlights gave way to the darkness of the countryside, he would have found a thin, vaguely phosphorescent circle apparently inscribed in the ground. Its centre was not far from where the Doctor’s TARDIS had landed. But now it proscribed an area approximately a mile across. And it was growing. Only slowly, but if Trove had been monitoring the circle from the start, he would have noticed that its rate of growth was increasing. From a centimetre or so at the start, it had now built up to around a metre per minute.
And if Trove had then piloted the flycam a little lower, bringing it in at a tangent to the front of the circle, he would have seen that the circle was just the intersection with the ground of a sphere, a huge bubble, inflating faster with every passing second.
The scintillating glow from the surface of the bubble faded with its height from the ground, becoming undetectable at about five metres. To Trove’s flycam, it would have looked like a huge, curved, diaphanous wall, sweeping across the ground. And whereas it had been just a few millimetres thick when it had started its journey, it had grown so that now it measured over a metre in depth. It was a wavefront – a wavefront of which Trove would instantly have known the significance.
‘Ah!’ said Tannalis in delight as his daughter peered around the door to his bedroom. ‘Sensi! Come in, come in!’
She closed the door quietly behind her and came over to sit on the bed.
‘Mother said you wanted to see me.’
‘And so I do!’ Tannalis leaned back a little and admired his daughter. She was, he knew, not the easiest of girls to get along with. He’d heard tales of her harassing and haranguing the Palace staff. No doubt her mother’s influence. But behind the sometimes haughty face of his little girl, he often saw a sadness, a heart-breaking desire to be liked. He knew it had been hard on her, being the Imperator’s daughter. Times had changed, and the Imperial Family no longer had the respect they once had. Which, he often reflected, was how it should be. Respect had to be earned, and he reluctantly had to admit that he and his family had done little to deserve anyone’s affection, never mind respect. The Saiarossans had made a big mistake when they had created the Imperatorship for Benhamin Auburon. They’d been so desperate to thank him for his success in averting the Almost War, that they’d have granted him any-117
thing in their power. And Benhamin, as Tannalis knew, had let power go to his head. So he’d asked for some sort of honorary title. Of course he’d known, through his network of contacts, what they’d offer him: ‘president’. But a few words in the right places, a few promised favours, and before he knew it, the word ‘Imperator’ was being bandied about. ‘No real power there,’ the government had said. ‘Just a name,’ they’d promised. But Benhamin had known better.
Now, on the eve of his 120th birthday, Tannalis had decided that he had to correct the mistakes of the past.
‘How’s things, then?’ he said. ‘I’ve hardly seen you for the past week. This birthday fiasco seems to have swallowed up everyone’s time and patience.’
Sensimi rolled her eyes.
‘Mother’s taken over completely,’ she said. ‘Again.’
Tannalis chuckled and squeezed his daughter’s hand.
‘I think that must