Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [110]
She felt her fingers go limp around the shotgun. She heard the soft thump as it dropped into the dust.
* * *
Six weeks earlier, two new aliens had turned up on Dust. Magdelana had met them at the gate, because the town had apparently been the nearest settlement to the part of the desert where they’d landed. Magdelana didn’t know what kind of ship had brought them to the planet, but she guessed it had probably crashed. Just as the Remote’s ship had crashed.
The aliens had been too big and leathery to be human, although they’d spoken the native dialect without any problems. They’d traded for supplies, and for some reason they’d asked a lot of questions about the Remote. Magdelana had taken one look at the clothes the aliens had worn, the all‐purpose survival gear and the full‐to‐bursting‐point ammo belts, and decided that, if anyone could take on the Remote’s soldiers, it was this new batch of offworlders.
Three days later, the satellite had found the two aliens out in the desert. They’d been crucified, nailed up on big wooden frames that had looked more like antennae than ordinary crosses. The satellite’s camera eye had still been working properly then, so Magdelana had spent almost an hour staring down at the dead things, wondering how much damage they’d been able to do before the Remote had taken them out.
There was light in Magdelana’s eyes now, and bloodspots, and salt water, and dust that had blown through the crack in her visor. She was staring up into the sun, and she could see that same shape burning in the middle of the light, the shape of one of the antenna‐crosses she’d seen out in the desert, this time with her own body nailed to the wood. Her future. Killed and left out to dry by the Remote, turned into a ‘symbolic gesture’ instead of a human being. She heard the clicking noise again, and this time she knew for a fact that it was the sound of the riders’ weapons, being readied for her execution.
‘Excuse me,’ said the man who was standing right behind her. ‘Is this all real, or is it just for the tourists?’
* * *
It took Magdelana a while to work out where she was. She realised she was still standing in the town gate, but she was facing the other way now, into the square on the other side. She didn’t remember turning. She heard the horses coughing and snorting behind her, and guessed that the Remote riders were still hovering outside the gate. They hadn’t opened fire. The man must have turned up just in time, distracting them at the last minute, stopping them from carrying out the execution…
The man. Yes. Concentrate on the man.
The man was normal. That was the first thing that struck Magdelana. Normal height, normal build, normal everything. His clothes were so normal, they almost looked perverse. A white shirt with puffed‐out sleeves, but perfectly clean, as if the dust hadn’t noticed it yet. Brown‐leather boots, in the local style. A waistcoat pulled tight around his body. His hair was long, tied into a ponytail at his neck, like one of the cattle drivers who passed by the town from the settlements off east.
At first, Magdelana guessed the man was an offworlder, someone who’d copied the clothes of the townspeople and got everything so right that it was wrong. But that wasn’t true, was it? The man knew he was going to stand out here, and knew he looked too clean and proper for a place like Dust, but he just didn’t care. He was dressed like a parody of one of the townspeople, not an imitation. Like a showman, getting everyone’s attention by being more like the locals than the locals were themselves. Even that blindfold –
Blindfold, thought Magdelana. She let the thought roll around her head for a while. The man was