Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [107]
And there were plenty of towns for the dust to feed on. There’d been cities, hundreds of years earlier; but since then the desert had simply breathed the buildings back in, sucking the raw materials down into the body of the planet. The people who were left behind picked what they could out of the colony’s teeth, mining the ground for nails and knives, drawing out their lives in a world where there was nothing better to do and no future to plan for. Like an Old West town where there was never any chance of the railroad arriving.
The settlements didn’t talk to each other much, which was why the first thing any newborn town did was build a wall around itself, always making sure that there was only one way in and one way out. The townspeople surrounded themselves with the weapons they’d managed to save: the pitchforks and pickaxes and shovels, even guns when they could find enough metal for the bullets and summon up the will to use the forges. But nothing ever left Dust, because nothing ever had the strength. Besides, nobody had anywhere else to go. Nobody had any reason to do anything, except eat, and scratch, and pick the lice out of their hair, and sweat into the dirt. Every day on Dust was much like another.
With the exception of this day. This day, which began with two riders heading for one of the walled‐off towns in the planet’s western hemisphere, scratching a trail of horse dung and upturned dust across the desert. A day that, against all expectations, would see Dust become one of the most important locations in the galaxy.
Politically speaking.
* * *
1
Moving Target
(it’s always High Noon somewhere in the universe)
According to the clock tower, It was just past eight o’clock in the morning when Magdelana walked out into the square. The satellite had woken her up as soon as it had seen the riders, screeching at her through the broken speaker in the corner of her room, talking to her in a computer language that the rest of the universe had forgotten a hundred years earlier. Nobody else was in the square when she limped towards the town gate, so she guessed the other locals had somehow seen the trouble coming and decided to let her deal with it on her own.
As far as anyone knew, the satellite was the only one on Dust. Nobody in town could remember seeing anything else like it, anyway. Magdelana didn’t remember exactly where they’d found it, but the townspeople had broken it while they’d been trying to figure out what it did, so the things that were supposed to make it float didn’t work properly any more. The townspeople had got round this problem by hanging the satellite from an old weather balloon, and tethering it to a rope that they’d tied to the top of the clock tower. It’d been a miracle, really, that the locals had found the energy to finish the job. Now the satellite spent its life floating in circles over the town limits, squinting through the dust that had stuck to its old glass eye, as though it could still see a moving target a couple of kilometres away. The monitor for the satellite had been left with Magdelana, seeing as she was already due to be the first in the firing line if there was trouble.
By the time she got to the gate, she could see the two riders on the horizon. Two black‐and‐grey smears, framed against the morning sunlight, with clouds of sand blowing up around the heels of their animals. The satellite picture had been blurry, because the lens had gone wrong while it had been in the air and nobody could be bothered to bring it back down to fix it, but Magdelana had been able to make out the basics. The animals were horses, real horses, and the armour the riders wore had made the camera crackle with static. Not a good sign.
It had taken Magdelana much,