Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [125]
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked the Doctor. His voice was quieter than it had been, and Magdelana could see hot red blotches forming on the side of his face, where the coffee had burned the top layer of skin.
‘Because I’m going to tell you what you want to know,’ Magdelana told him. ‘And I’m going to tell you how things are going to be. Far as I’m concerned, there could’ve been all kinds of offworlders turning up here in the Clan days, and I never would’ve noticed. The Clansmen would have killed them all off as soon as they set foot near any of the towns. They didn’t trust aliens, so they killed them. We killed them. Never killed any myself, never even saw any. But that’s the way things were.’
The Doctor opened his mouth again. Magdelana kept talking. ‘Now tell you one more thing,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to let the offworlders take this town. I don’t care whether it’s the Remote, or the blind man, or anyone else. I’m going to protect this place any way I’ve got to, whether it’s worth protecting or not. And I’m going to do it how the Clan taught me to do it, because that’s the way I’ve always done it and it’s the only thing I know how to do. I’m going to trust you for now, that’s what I’m saying. Don’t know why, but I am. But if it comes down to it, I’ll kill anything around here that doesn’t belong on this planet. Anything I have to kill to make this place safe. You get the idea?’
The Doctor nodded.
‘So,’ Magdelana concluded. ‘What d’you think of me now?’
‘I think you’re obviously a very intelligent woman,’ the Doctor told her, keeping his voice low. ‘And I don’t understand you at all.’
‘Good,’ said Magdelana. ‘Now, d’you want me to help you find that girlfriend of yours?’
‘I’d appreciate that,’ said the Doctor.
* * *
At eight o’clock in the evening – just as the Doctor was entering the home of Magdelana Bishop – the small town called Anathema effectively ceased to exist, as the ship at its heart lifted itself out of the dust for the first time since it had arrived on the planet. The ship was still quite capable of short‐range flight, even if it couldn’t make the big leap out into space, and the assembled Remote forces on board were already arming up for a pitched battle.
What nobody on board realised, not even the oldest of the Remote himself, was the fact that the ship had effectively been bugged. There were programs in the flight computer that had been planted there by Faction Paradox, centuries in the past, when the Remote had still been under the Faction’s direct control. The programs had been careful to record all major events on Dust over the last twelve hours, and, at more or less the same moment that the ship tore itself out of the ground, the systems made the decision to send all the data they’d gathered back to the elders of the Faction.
They settled down after that, safe in the knowledge that they’d done their job to the best of their ability.
* * *
4
The Show
(Sarah Jane Smith is not amused)
The sky was going grey by the time Sarah reached the travelling show. Well, greyish‐yellow, anyway. Which was probably as pretty and as picturesque as the sunsets got around here.
The show had been set up about fifty yards outside the town wall, so from the gate you could see it as a big dark lump against the desert horizon. It was a circle of wagons, Sarah noted. Covered wagons, like you saw in old Wild West TV shows, but covered with a kind of dull dirt‐coloured tarpaulin that the local dust just didn’t seem to