Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [118]
But blood…
The Doctor looked up at her, his fingers still covered in patches of icky red. His face seemed softer than usual, even though the wrinkles were as deep and as well chiselled as ever. He was wearing his velvet jacket and his best green cravat, so he looked exactly the way he always looked, but there was blood on his hands and it wasn’t supposed to be there. And he must have known what she was thinking, because he said, ‘This really isn’t me at all, is it?’
The next thing she knew, the Doctor was his old self again, concentrating on the navigational panels and pretending that the blood at his feet wasn’t even there. Standing in the middle of all the horror, he looked as if he’d been added to the scene after it had been filmed. Like a bad special effect. All that was missing was the little blue line around him.
Sarah peeked over his shoulder. The readings on the navigational panel didn’t mean much to her, but somehow she’d expected the co‐ordinates for her home world to look much simpler than the ones she could see there.
‘Earth?’ she tried.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Sarah Jane. I’m afraid we’ve been… well, diverted.’
‘The Time Lords?’
He sighed. ‘No. No, I don’t think so. Wherever we are now, there’s been some kind of temporal interference. The TARDIS has been drawn to it like a bear to honey.’ He looked up then, at least acknowledging the blood on the walls. ‘I don’t think this is the sort of place she’d usually go. Poor old girl.’
‘So you don’t know where we are?’
The Doctor was obviously glad to have an excuse to look down at the panel again. ‘Thirty‐eighth century, give or take a calendar change or two. An old human colony world, by the looks of things. Right on the edge of the galaxy. On almost exactly the other side of Mutters’ Spiral to Quiescia.’
He raised his hand to his face, and Sarah guessed that he was about to scratch his chin. But he stopped himself in the nick of time, spotting the splotches of red on his fingers. He stared at the mess for a few moments more, as if he had no idea what to do about it.
‘All right,’ he said, and Sarah wasn’t sure whether he was talking to her or to the Ship. ‘We’ll get ourselves cleaned up, then we can go out and see what’s happening. How does that sound?’
* * *
‘This really isn’t me at all, is it?’
The TARDIS had arrived in a narrow alleyway, between two dust‐bitten wooden buildings that looked as though they’d been made out of scraps from older constructions, so the Doctor had to squeeze himself against the side of the TARDIS to get out through the doors. The sky overhead – what he could see of it in the crack between the buildings – was a sickly‐looking yellow, streaked across with bands of black. The black parts definitely weren’t clouds, but they looked natural anyway, as if the planet had seen the humans coming and decided to pollute itself before they arrived, just out of spite. The air was dry, and there were particles of sand in every breath he took. He guessed it was sundown, by the local clocks.
He felt the dust crunch under his shoes when he took a step forward, and somehow he knew in a second what he was walking on. He could feel the rubble under his feet, the remains of the older human settlements. The bleached bones of cattle and people. Native cacti spores, pushing their roots deeper and deeper into the buried foundations. A whole archaeological layer of bullets and lynching rope.
‘Ugh,’ said Sarah, somewhere behind him.
There was blood on the air, too, although some of the smell may just have been stuck in his nose after what had happened in the TARDIS. That was a terrible, degrading thing to see happen to an old friend. Not the