Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [14]
‘Gotcha,’ said Sam.
The men were talking. Sam brushed the keypad on the side of the binoculars’ casing, telling the systems to lip‐read for her. The systems did their best, and displayed the results of their analysis in fluorescent green letters across the bottom of the picture.
[???] WON’T BE LONG NOW I [?I’VE] MET SOME OF [???] FACE TO FACE I [?I’VE] GOT A BETTER IDEA OF WHAT TO EXPLODE FROM THEM
‘“Explode”?’ Sam mumbled, to the binoculars. ‘God, you’re obsessed. You’re not in a war zone now, y’know.’
The shorter of the men spoke: ARE WE GOING STRAIGHT BACK TO THE HOTEL. OR [???] WE [???] COMPASSION TO LOOK AFTER [???] COLD HERE
Sam clicked her tongue. The systems weren’t making much sense of this. Still, she’d caught enough of the conversation to give her something to go on.
The man had said ‘hotel’.
She switched off the binoculars, and got to her feet. She was going to track them back to their lair. She was going to do the job she’d been brought here to do. Just like the Doctor would have done it. Probably.
* * *
Earlier
Somewhere in the TARDIS, a telephone was ringing.
Sam had been in the corridor outside her quarters when the noise had started, so she’d been the one to notice it. She’d followed the sound for a good five minutes, and made at least a dozen turnings on the way, all the time wondering how the ringing managed to carry so well through the passages. The TARDIS, she’d concluded, did funny things to acoustics, the same way it did funny things to dimensions.
And now she’d found it. The room with the telephone. ‘Room’ being a relative term, of course. There were several parts of the TARDIS that pretended to be outside, where artificial skies had been stretched across the ceiling, or where the walls were set so far apart that they vanished over a makeshift horizon. This was different, though. There was no ceiling, but Sam got the feeling it was because somebody had forgotten to invent one, not because they’d wanted to make an impression. The TARDIS was, according to the Doctor, modelled out of pure mathematics, and here you couldn’t help but feel that someone hadn’t finished their sums, that they’d got halfway through the equations and then scrawled ‘oh, about five’ in red biro at the bottom of the page.
So. No ceiling, no walls. A sky the colour of the roundels in the ‘old’ part of the ship. And, in the middle of it all, the hill.
The hill was made of rubbish, there was no polite way of putting it. A heap of detritus, of old machinery and half‐finished artwork. There were computer terminals, there were washbasins, there were Greek statues that seemed to have been split right down the middle. There were typewriters, telegraph poles, steam engines, hat stands, and chaise longues. There were clocks, lots and lots of clocks, whole assemblies of watch faces and LED displays, all melding together on the slopes of the hill, the mound levelling out at the edges of the room before vanishing over another one of those imaginary horizons. There was rubbish, just rubbish, but all of it looked shiny and new, and all of it was exactly the same colour. Off‐white. The default TARDIS colour.
And on top of it all, at the very peak of the mound, sat a big red telephone box.
‘Indoor hiking,’ Sam told the TARDIS. ‘Another great hobby from the people who brought you home scuba diving and kitchen rambling. Just don’t let it stop ringing before I get there, OK?’
So she started to climb, finding the rubbish solid under her feet, as if the hill had been welded into a single unit. The TARDIS was made from mathematics, she reasoned. Mathematical patterns, put together the way the Doctor saw fit, the whole ship made out of whatever default units had been programmed into the TARDIS databanks, or whatever they were called. This wasn’t a room, then. It was an information dump, a memory storage area for the patterns that weren’t currently in use. And, this being the TARDIS, you