Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [66]
It wasn’t Earth they had to worry about, was it? There’d be ships in the skies soon, but not human‐built ones. Not that you’d expect anyone to notice what was really going on here, not with the media being so carefully stage‐managed. Of course, he did have a certain advantage, seeing as he’d met the people who actually controlled the colony.
Seeing as he was about to give in to them. Seeing as he was about to let them ‘initiate’ him.
Fitz moved along the balcony once he’d reached the top of the stairway, finding a spot where he had a better view of the chasm at the heart of the spire. Somebody dropped from one of the upper levels as he watched, and the floating TV sets went into ‘emergency’ mode, clustering together and spinning dinky plastic webs. Getting ready to catch the leaper before he hit the ground. A second group of TVs went into ‘record’ mode nearby, in case anything went wrong with the operation.
There were a couple of dozen lift shafts on the other side of the chasm, like shiny glass arteries, pumping all the tiny little people to and from the docking areas at the top of the spire. None of them would have any idea what was really going on here, Fitz reminded himself. None of them would have guessed that soon, very soon, this whole planet would be taken apart by the Time Lords.
By the Doctor’s people. He kept telling himself that, in the hope that it’d stop him pining for the TARDIS. He wasn’t really missing the Doctor, any more than he would’ve missed a thunderstorm or a forest fire or any other force of nature, but there were little things that he kept reaching out for and not finding, parts of his life on board the TARDIS that he still felt should be there for him. He kept remembering the Doctor, pottering around the console room the day before they’d got the call to Earth from the UN. The Doctor had discovered a switch on the console that he hadn’t recognised, that had quite possibly only just grown there, and Fitz had watched him as he’d poked and prodded at it, just to see what it did. When he’d finally figured it out, the Doctor had taken a marker pen out of one of his pockets and scrawled the switch’s name on the console in scribbly black lettering.
That was what Fitz had really been missing: the messiness of it all. You couldn’t imagine anyone writing on the walls of Jumpstart Island, not without sixty‐eight different alarm systems going off. And the people who really ran the place? They liked things that were black and spiky, things that made scary‐looking shadows on the walls. Hard to imagine people like that driving Volkswagens, or keeping rooms full of butterflies on board their ships, or… anything much, really.
That wasn’t going to stop him, though.
He moved on, heading around the balcony towards the lift shafts. Somewhere up there, hovering in the planet’s upper atmosphere, was the warship where his new employers would be waiting for him. The warship was linked to the spire by a boarding tube, Fitz had been told, but the vessel itself had been shrouded to stop anybody noticing it from ground level.
It had to stay hidden, or the natives would have panicked. It was that kind of ship.
* * *
The boarding tube was black and rubbery, a mile‐long tentacle of slippery air‐sealed plastic, with a terminal at each end where you could climb on to an atmosphere buggy and get whisked off to the other terminal in under a minute. When Fitz finally reached it, the warship turned out to be black and slippery as well. At least, those parts of it that didn’t look as though they’d been built out of bone.
Mother Mathara was waiting for him in the opening of the airlock. She was in full Faction Paradox ceremonial