Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [19]
Unwisely, she left the binoculars behind.
* * *
Earlier
The man’s name was Coldicott, although there didn’t seem to be a rank attached to it. Sam didn’t bother telling him that she wasn’t the owner of the TARDIS. She waited until the Doctor followed her out, and let the man figure it out for himself.
Coldicott spent a few moments flipping through his papers, and Sam saw him peering at a number of photographs, comparing them with the Doctor’s face. The Doctor, meanwhile, busied himself by inspecting the red telephone box in the corner. There was a tangle of broken metal around the base of the box, although Sam didn’t immediately figure out what it was.
‘Right,’ Coldicott said, after much paper‐shuffling. ‘So, you’re the Young Edwardian version.’
The Doctor looked up, but only briefly. ‘I can’t help feeling you people know far too much,’ he said. ‘You’re so casual about things these days. There really is only one of me, you know.’
‘Then how come we keep having to print up new ID cards for you?’
‘I’m deliberately sabotaging the bureaucratic process. That’s the whole point of regeneration. Didn’t you know? Now, this really is interesting.’ The Doctor tapped the side of the phone box. ‘I wasn’t expecting the telegraph to have changed state at this end as well. The TARDIS must be stronger than I thought. She’s not bad, for her age.’
‘We kept the telegraph in that filing cabinet,’ Coldicott explained, indicating the heap of twisted metal. ‘Did a hell of a lot of damage when it morphed.’
‘“Morphed”?’ said the Doctor. Sam had never heard him sound so offended.
‘Why don’t we just talk about the emergency?’ she suggested.
‘Right,’ said Coldicott.
Ten minutes later, they were sitting in a darkened VCR suite on another floor of what was, apparently, a UN base at a top‐secret location somewhere in Britain. (‘Is it Swanley?’ the Doctor had said, when Coldicott had told him. ‘It smells like Swanley.’) They’d managed to wake Fitz up by that point, so he was sprawled out in the seat next to Sam’s, looking for all the world like a pile of old denim that had somehow developed the ability to sweat. Coldicott’s briefing didn’t make a lot of sense, as the TARDIS’s language banks were translating it into English from the man’s native Bureaucratese, but luckily there was a video recording that was supposed to explain everything.
‘So there’s no emergency, as such?’ the Doctor queried.
Coldicott shook his head, but looked as though he didn’t want to risk saying ‘no’. ‘We’re not being invaded, if that’s what you mean.’
‘But there are aliens?’ asked Sam.
‘And they’ve been in touch with the UN?’ added the Doctor.
‘Yep. This is all ultra‐high‐level, OK?’
‘Oh, do we have clearance?’ mumbled Fitz, becoming semisentient for the first time that day.
Coldicott shrugged. ‘You’re with the Doctor. It doesn’t matter whether we give you clearance or not, he’s going to drag you into this. So we might as well play let’s pretend.’
‘Cheers,’ said Sam.
‘Let me see if I’ve got this right,’ the Doctor cut in. ‘A group of alien life forms – who’ve decided not to give you the name of their species, or any kind of background data – has been in contact with the United Nations. And now you want my services as… what? A “consultant”?’
‘Not as a consultant,’ said Coldicott. ‘As a diplomat. We’d get our scientific adviser to do it, but she’s vanished.’
‘Vanished?’
‘Yeah, vanished. She does that a lot. She’ll probably be back in a couple of weeks.’
‘Nice security arrangements,’ Sam noted.
‘A diplomat,’ the Doctor repeated. ‘So the aliens want to negotiate?’
Coldicott shrugged again. ‘Let’s face it, this is the first time any ET intelligence has wanted to meet us over the conference table. So –’
‘Apart from the Axons,’ the Doctor pointed out.
‘We don’t talk about that.’
‘And the –’
‘Apart from them,’ said Coldicott. ‘Look, maybe it’s not what you call an emergency, but this is big‐league stuff for us, OK? If everything works