Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [43]
The next thing Kode knew, there was a face at his shoulder. It was the girl, leaning forward, poking her head between the two front seats. The guard grunted at her, and clamped an oversized hand on her shoulder, but she didn’t lean back.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Who, me? Erm. Kode. K‐o‐d‐e.’
‘Kode. And your friend’s called Compassion, yeah?’
‘Um… yeah.’
‘Tell me something, Kode.’ Hello. This sounded interesting. Kode was starting to get a good buzz from his receiver. ‘You people,’ the girl went on. ‘You’re time travellers, aren’t you?’
Kode furrowed his eyebrows. ‘Of course we’re not time travellers. We haven’t been able to time travel in… I don’t know… years.’
The girl slumped back in her seat, and exchanged glances with her companion. ‘Oh well. That’s my best theory out of the window.’
‘We’re abductees,’ Kode added.
The girl leaned forward again, but this time the guard stopped her, and pushed her back. The guard’s stated reason for doing this was ‘nnnuuh’.
Kode caught the girl’s eye in the mirror, and tried to look apologetic. ‘Sorry. Hope you don’t mind the guards. Not much class.’
‘What, the Ogrons? Don’t worry about it.’
Kode slapped the wheel with both hands. ‘I knew it. I knew everyone’d know what they were.’
‘I’ve seen Ogrons before,’ said the girl. ‘Not many other people around here would have done.’
‘Present company excepted,’ the woman (whose name still definitely wasn’t Bland) muttered.
‘Yeah, but they’re so obvious, aren’t they?’ said Kode. ‘Everybody uses Ogrons. Think of all the security hardware there is, you know?’
The Ogron rumbled. Kode wondered if it was agreeing or protesting.
When they’d finalised the arrangements for this business trip, even Compassion hadn’t been sure about the Ogrons, although her reasons had been more practical than Kode’s. There were no alien life forms on Earth, Compassion had argued. Not officially, anyway. The natives would obviously be able to tell that the Ogrons didn’t belong on the planet, that something was wrong somewhere. But Guest, as ever, had claimed to know better. Most of the people they’d be dealing with would be Europeans, he’d pointed out. And Europeans were useless at identifying anything that wasn’t European. According to Guest, to the eyes of the average British businessman, an Ogron would look just like a large, ugly, dark‐skinned man; in fact, exactly what they’d expect foreign labour to look like.
Compassion had been satisfied by that, although Kode had been cynical. He didn’t see how a local human could be fooled into thinking an Ogron was one of his own species, just by making the guards wear badly fitting suits and dark glasses, or by shaving off their embarrassing facial hair. But, much to Kode’s annoyance, it had worked. That morning, they’d strolled around COPEX with the two guards in tow, and, if anyone had spotted anything out of the ordinary, the locals had kept quiet about it. It was the local transmissions, Kode decided. The signals were so slow, they had no flexibility. The natives just assumed the Ogrons had to be ugly foreigners; they didn’t have anything else to think.
‘Can I ask something else?’ the girl said.
Kode listened to the receiver. The signals from the telegraph poles were saying it’s good to talk, so he decided to go with it. ‘Yeah, if you like.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Total age?’ said Kode. ‘Twenty.’
‘Total age?’
‘Yeah. Standard base age of eighteen, plus two years since I was remembered. Twenty.’
The girl nodded. ‘Right. What about Guest? He’s a lot older than you and Compassion, isn’t he?’
‘Suppose so. Why?’
‘I just wondered. Guest’s your leader, and he looks like he’s –’
‘He’s not our leader,’ Kode snapped. He hadn’t meant to sound so aggressive, but there’d been a spike in the signals, and it had started his skull buzzing, making the nerves jangle at the top of his spine.
‘Sorry,