Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [44]
Kode realised he was starting to hyperventilate. Panicking. His eyes flickered across the mirror, taking in the rest of the back seat.
The woman – the other woman – had something in her mouth. Something bright and silvery. Kode would have slammed on the brakes, if the brakes had been under his control. Instead, he just whipped his head around.
‘What’s that?’ he yelped.
The woman froze, the silver thing jammed between her lips. ‘Noffing,’ she said.
The security guard grumbled at her, and tugged the thing out of her mouth. Kode wondered why the Ogron hadn’t seen the object before. Once the guard had finished sniffing at the thing, he passed it to Kode.
It looked like a whistle. A little silver whistle. Judging by the interference it was causing in his receiver, it had some kind of electronic component built into it.
‘It’s my inhaler,’ the woman said.
The girl sniggered. Kode ignored her. He turned the whistle over in his hands, leaving the steering wheel to its own devices. ‘What is it?’ he asked.
The woman sighed. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Seeing as we’re still sitting here in the back of your car with no hope of escape, it obviously hasn’t worked.’
Kode thought about that.
‘Fair enough,’ he said. He put the whistle in his jacket pocket, and turned his attention back to the controls of the car.
‘I think I’ve met these people before,’ he heard the woman mutter. The girl muttered something back, something that sounded like a question, but the woman didn’t answer. Then the girl leaned forward again.
‘One more question,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘Why did you call off your deal with the UN? We’ve been trying to figure that out.’
Kode shrugged. ‘We just changed our minds,’ he said.
He thought he caught a strange look passing between the two women.
‘Of course you did,’ the girl murmured. ‘The transmissions. I forgot.’
* * *
2:
The whistle was just a whistle. You blew through one end, and something sharp and spiky and ultrasonic came out of the other. But ordinary whistles didn’t have much of a range, which was why the electronics had been added, tiny micro‐micro‐microtransmitters welded along the length of the metal. The very latest communications technology, as pioneered by the Royal Ordnance, and modified by the very unit the whistle was designed to communicate with.
And at that precise moment, the unit in question was being stored in a side office at Sandown Park, where Sarah had left it running surveillance. Taking the unit to COPEX had been a risk, of course: there’d been no way of knowing whether the aliens, or whatever they were, were capable of spotting a blatantly anachronistic piece of technology. But, as the unit itself had argued, logic dictated that the aliens weren’t as familiar with local technology as they should have been. Besides, all the components of the unit were contemporaneous. It was just the design that belonged in the fiftieth century.
In the time it had been waiting, the unit had performed at least two dozen self‐diagnostic scans, just to make sure the human called Llewis hadn’t damaged it when he’d tripped over its casing earlier in the day. That done, the unit had shut itself down for a while, to conserve its energy supplies. And to stop itself getting bored.
When the signal came, the unit automatically reactivated its secondary motor functions, then tuned its receptors to the frequency of the whistle. Slowly, the hydraulic systems at the front of its body engaged themselves, and the unit raised the artificial neural attachment that was, in some circles, referred to as its head.
‘Mistress,’ it said.
Nobody thought much of the object as it rolled out of the office. COPEX was full of technology nobody really understood, not unless you printed the specs on a glossy leaflet and told everyone the number of volts it could deliver. Some of the businessmen laughed at the thing as it trundled past them, while the foreign visitors just nodded, taking the machine to be another example of that curious British sense of humour they’d always been warned about. The