Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [109]
Two weeks later, Magdelana had used the satellite to zoom in on what was left of the body. There’d just been bones by then, once all the flesh had been torn off by the birds and the wind. But the thing that stuck in Magdelana’s mind was the fact that there’d been two skeletons there in the desert, one nesting inside the other. She still wasn’t sure whether the Remote were built differently from other human beings, or whether the outer skeleton was really just the framework of the armour, all that was left after the metal had been stripped away.
Either way, it didn’t give her much hope that she’d be able to stop the riders with a shotgun.
* * *
The first of the horses came to a stop just a metre or two from the gateway, and the second drew up by the side of it, wriggling and snorting under the weight of its rider. Magdelana still couldn’t see the faces of the Remote, not with their heads framed by the sunlight. She could hear their armour buzzing to itself in the heat, sucking in air and breathing out dust.
She felt her fingers twitching inside her gloves, getting ready to pull the trigger of the shotgun. Not that she could risk firing. She’d get only one shot before the Remote had their own weapons ready, and it’d take more than a single cartridge of lead to crack the armour.
So. Either she was going to stare them down – somehow – or they were going to kill her.
You don’t know me. You don’t know me at all.
For the first few moments, the riders didn’t move, but just sat there on the backs of their horses. Staring down at her as if they couldn’t remember why they’d even bothered coming. Remote people did that, Magdelana told herself. Something to do with the receivers in their necks.
‘You know who we are?’ asked the first rider, eventually.
Magdelana nodded with the end of her shotgun. She made sure she kept it pointed at the man’s chest plate.
‘We’ve come for your settlement,’ the man said, in a matter‐of‐fact kind of way.
Magdelana squinted at them through the dust‐visor. ‘Just two of you?’ she asked. Trying to make her voice as deep and as scratchy as possible. Anything to stop herself sounding old, or tired, or half dead.
‘We’re here for purely symbolic reasons,’ the man explained.
‘You’re an assigned defender of this settlement?’ the second rider asked.
Magdelana took one hand away from the shotgun, and tapped the badge on the lapel of her coat. It was just a plastic ID card, so worn‐down by the desert that all you could make out was the vague outline of the photo, but everyone who saw it knew what it meant. The badge had belonged to some imperial security expert or other, back in the days when people could still remember why Dust had been colonised, and it was his photo on the card. Probably the only symbol of law and order on the planet that had outlived the empire.
Magdelana’s job didn’t have a title, but everybody knew what she was here for. She was here to get shot before anyone else.
‘We have instructions,’ the second rider announced.
‘The first assigned defender is to be executed,’ the other man added. Again, Magdelana got the feeling she was listening to a manifesto instead of a human being. ‘This will be considered a symbolic gesture by the other inhabitants. Full occupation of the settlement will follow. No further resistance is expected.’
Magdelana’s free hand dropped back down to her shotgun. She tried to raise it, to point it at the man’s chest plate again, but her fingers kept fumbling on the metal, and a bright spark of pain was leaping up from her leg and all the way through her left side. She heard the clicking noise, and didn’t know whether it was the sound of the Remote’s guns being cocked (did they even cock their guns, she wondered, or was it true