Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [23]
What did Sam say next? Think. Think.
‘Then how come they didn’t look totally human?’ said Sam.
‘Ah.’ The Doctor nodded. ‘You mean, the way they look –’
‘Like they’ve all been computer‐enhanced. Yeah.’
‘Well, they’re culturally human, certainly. Whether they’re genetically human, I couldn’t say.’
Coldicott let some sigh‐flavoured air out of his lungs. ‘OK. Some people who aren’t spacemen want us to think they’re spacemen, just so they can sell us some security hardware, even though they’re not salesmen. You want to try explaining any of this to Geneva?’
A millisecond later, the Doctor was on his feet, feeling up the cloth of his lapels.
‘Let me put it this way,’ he said. ‘I accept your kind offer of employment.’
‘Oh, good,’ droned Coldicott.
‘I accept your kind offer of employment.’ That was it. Those were the exact words. Yes.
Perhaps that had been a mistake. Tactically speaking.
Bearing in mind everything that had happened since.
* * *
Dawn
Badar opened his eyes. At least, he thought he opened his eyes, but the nerves to his eyelids felt like they’d been severed, so it was hard to say for sure. When his eyes were closed, he could see the blood cells inside his head, big red blotches huddling together for safety. When his eyes were open, he could see much the same thing.
Really, there’d been no reason for them to use the electric batons on his eyes. It didn’t hurt any more than any other sensitive part of the body. But it was the idea that had made him scream, when he’d realised what they’d been planning. That was ridiculous, wasn’t it? The pain was the same whatever they did, but the thing that had forced the noise out of his lungs had been the idea.
Perhaps ideas were the only things that mattered. He’d been thinking that more and more these last few days. What happened to his body seemed… irrelevant. Parts of it would burn, parts of it would prickle, parts of it would twitch and shake when he didn’t want them to, where the guards had done terrible things to the nerve connections under the skin. It hardly seemed to make a difference which of his organs ceased to function next. On the other hand, what went on inside his head seemed important. Untouchable. Sacred, almost.
They should have left his eyes alone.
Beyond the blood cells, he could see a smear of grey, the dull wash of the room’s ceiling. He tried moving his head, and the smear wobbled from side to side, until he could almost make out the angles in the corners. It was difficult, sometimes, to work out the difference between the things that happened in the cell and the things that happened in the dreams. He seemed to remember the guards standing over him in the night, the skin running down their faces like candle wax, turning black and peeling away until he’d been able to see the bone underneath. Well, that had probably been a dream. There had been voices, too, the sounds of men shouting, banging doors and making threats. That had probably been real.
Banging doors. Sometime during the night, long after the guards had gone away, the door had opened again. There’d been a shuffling in the cell. Breathing. Heavy breathing. And Badar didn’t think it had been his own.
He turned his head, so his eyes were facing the rest of the cell. The angles of the ceiling lurched horribly, and he was very nearly sick.
There was someone else here. You could tell. A square of yellow appeared in the middle of the grey, the window that looked out on to the courtyard, and there was a lumpy thing framed against the light that had to be, had to be, a human head.
Another prisoner. No, but that wasn’t possible. The other prisoner in Badar’s cell had been executed. His head had been sliced away from his shoulders. He couldn’t be here now, not if he was dead. Could he?
Wait. Maybe the other prisoner was a different other prisoner.
Oh yes. Of course. There were plenty of prisoners. There were more than five people in the world,