Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [132]
There weren’t any people on the streets of the town. Most of the locals were at the show, and the rest were generally too sick or too tired to leave their homes. So nobody saw I.M. Foreman as he strolled through the gate, nobody saw him head along the alley where the police box had materialised, and nobody saw him sit down in the dust a yard or two from the TARDIS doors, crossing his legs and turning his blind eyes towards the battered old paint work.
He couldn’t see a thing, of course, not in the conventional sense of the word ‘see’. But there were other senses he could use, and that was how he’d known about the TARDIS in the first place, how he’d found his way here from the safety of the show. He could see the structure of the craft in his head, not the actual physical details, but the mathematical formulae that held the box together. He spent some time examining the ship’s equations, with no purpose other than pure enjoyment. He knew how much trouble the TARDIS and its owner might cause, but for the time being it hardly seemed to matter. It had been much, much too long since he’d seen anything like this.
‘Beautiful,’ he announced, after a while. Then he stood up, turned away, and headed back towards the show. Satisfied.
* * *
5
A Fistful of Meanwhiles
(what everyone was doing just before the big fight started)
Meanwhile, on board the Remote ship that had until recently been a small town called Anathema:
Half an hour earlier, the command post had been a building. It was part of the vessel’s original bodywork, not one of the wood‐and‐plaster structures that had been slapped on top of the wreck, but so much sand had stuck to the black metal shell that it had looked exactly like every other ruin on Dust. Now the slipstream was blasting the sand away, turning the tower into something sleek and sharp and evil‐looking again.
But not on the inside. On the inside, the oldest of the Remote was standing with his back to the observation screen, trying his best to ignore the scenery. He’d felt rooted on Dust. Not that he liked the planet, any more than anyone could ever like it, but even nowhere was somewhere. The local culture had crept into his living space in the years since the crash, blowing into the corridors of the ship just like the sand had blown over the surface, until the post was cluttered with crates and shelves and writing desks, rotting antiques and chairs made out of sawdust. You could hardly see the sheer black of the walls now, not for all the shotguns and rifles that had been put on display in their cracked glass cases, not for all the ammo clips that had been hung on their hooks around the room.
Oh, and there was the Collection. There was always the Collection. The spoils of a two‐thousand‐year lifespan, although it wasn’t until the ship had arrived on Dust that the oldest had thought about mounting the heads on one of the walls. It seemed to fit the aesthetic of the planet, somehow. All the heads had belonged to Time Lords, naturally – or to people who’d been close to becoming Time Lords, thanks to the High Council’s tinkering with the lesser races – and the oldest had carefully wrapped them up in stasis bubbles as well as having them stuffed, just to make sure they stayed fresh. He’d collected the first of the heads during the twenty‐second century, when he’d still been under the wing of Faction Paradox itself, but even that one was only just starting to show signs of wear and tear.
There were little wooden plaques under all the items in the Collection, although none of them were marked with names. Just numbers, the recognition codes that had been sewn into the Time Lords’ DNA when they’d enrolled at the Academy on Gallifrey. There were far too many renegade Gallifreyans in the universe, everybody knew that, and the oldest felt he was performing a kind of public service by getting rid of them. Certainly, the dead old faces that stared at him from the walls of the command post were less than memorable. Only the Master and the Rani really stood out, although the oldest knew full well that