Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [36]
The generators started to hum before he’d even finished standing. Guest had been able to hear the interference ever since he’d walked into the room, but now it was almost painful, the hardware picking up a thousand different local transmissions and trying to pump all of them through his receiver at once. The threshold became a doorway, the line stretching upward, turning into a solid rectangle of static. At least, that was how Guest saw it. The interference was already starting to make him hallucinate, though, so it could all have been a delusion.
‘There are sound economic reasons for going ahead with this policy at this precise time,’ Guest recited, moving his lips in time to the pulsing of the receiver. ‘This is what we’ll all be wearing in the high street next year. Things just keep getting smaller, had you noticed? The Prince of Wales has denied everything. If you want, I could write it down. Have you ever wondered what happens to us when we die?’
And now there were shapes forming in the static, two great lumbering shapes, their dark skins shining in the television glare. The haze spat out the security guards, regurgitated their suits, vomited out their sunglasses. The guards were made whole again, piece by piece.
Coming in from the Cold.
* * *
Travels with Fitz (II)
The Cold, no given time
He was…
…somewhere.
Well, that was helpful.
Fitz tried to remember where he’d been, on the grounds that it was as good a place to start as any. He had a sneaking suspicion he’d done this before, and gone over the memory so many times that his subconscious was inventing new bits just out of boredom. He didn’t have anything better to do, though, so he decided to go through it all one more time. His memory was evidently in as many pieces as his body, but he found himself thinking of that book again, the Theoretical Monsters one that UNISYC had supplied him with in Geneva. He remembered lying on the bed in his room, ticking the boxes, credible or noncredible. Telling himself that the ones who looked like men in suits had to be real, and vice versa.
The Cybermen were obviously real. The Xxxxxxxxxxlanthi were obviously made up. The Gel Guards? Like something somebody had invented just to take the piss, and therefore probably genuine. But his favourite aliens in the book, by a long way, had been the Kalekani.
Aggressive military species, the book had claimed, hailing from an oxygen‐rich pastoral world in the galaxy next door to Earth’s. The Kalekani were apparently unique, in that they combined a warlike temperament with a love of idyllic natural beauty. According to the profile, they invaded worlds by terraforming them, eradicating entire cultures and turning whole planets into stretches of quiet countryside. But, instead of altering the victim‐world with the usual hi‐tech machinery, the Kalekani had developed a special terraforming virus, designed to take over the minds of the planet’s natives. The locals would devastate their own world while they were under the influence of the virus, tearing up the biosphere until every inch of land was covered in slopes and flats of pure unsullied green. The virus had a thousand names, one for each world it had destroyed, but on Earth it was generally known as ‘golf’.
A great big cross had gone into the noncredible box next to that one.
The Doctor had developed his own system for remembering alien species, of course. He’d once demonstrated it to Fitz in the TARDIS console room, and it had involved his making wiggly alien shapes with the fingers of one hand, then turning the hand upside down to make the same shapes in reverse. Presumably representing an entirely different species.
‘Bad Mandrels, mad Bandrils,’ the Doctor had explained. ‘That’s how I remember them, anyway.’
‘You’ve got to have a system,’ Sam had murmured.
No. Don’t think about the Doctor, Fitz told himself. You’ll just get grumpy. Concentrate on what happened