Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [75]
When she’d first come to her senses, she’d assumed there were no walls around her, but now she realised there was actually one wall, smooth and curved and greyish‐white, with no visible corners. She was inside a small dome, then, the doorway in front of her being the only obvious exit. Apart from the plastic chair under her backside, the only furnishings were the pieces of hi‐tech hardware that had been set up around her. There were half a dozen of them arranged in a ring, each one a kind of bent silver claw, with the sharpened tips pointing towards the chair. The claws were smooth, each one moulded out of a single piece of whatever it was, almost looking as if they’d torn through the floor from somewhere on the next level down and were now trying to form a fist around her. They were more like sculptures than pieces of technology.
Sam kept prodding the skin around her throat, just in case. Compassion was looking at her in a funny way.
‘Have you lost something?’ the woman asked.
‘The receiver,’ Sam mumbled. ‘Where is it?’
Compassion felt her own ear, apparently just a reflex action. ‘What receiver?’
‘I was in that place again. Hallucinating.’
Compassion nodded. ‘I just retrieved you. You can pick up all kinds of signals, when you’re moving between here and the skin of the Cold. It’s normal.’
Sam narrowed her eyes. ‘There’s no receiver?’
‘Not for you, no. We didn’t think it was worth the bother. You don’t react to it the same way we do. We’re going to have to find another way to get what we want.’
Sam lowered her hand, satisfied. Then she realised.
Her hands weren’t tied. Her arms were free, and she wasn’t attached to the chair. Furthermore, Compassion seemed to be the only person around. Were they getting overconfident, or had they just got their signals mixed up?
‘And what is it you want?’ Sam asked, trying to sound casual.
Compassion had to think about that. Or maybe she was just listening to the receiver. ‘To start with, Guest just wanted to know if you’d come to stop us,’ she said. ‘He wanted to understand you properly. You know. Threat evaluation. But things have got a bit beyond that now.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. He wants to take you to the main transmitter.’
Compassion had put quite a lot of emphasis on those last two words, which didn’t strike Sam as a good omen. The main transmitter was presumably where the Remote got their instructions from, the thing that beamed out the signals for the aliens’ receivers. Promising, thought Sam. But then, if she’d started picking up signals even without a receiver, what was the main transmitter going to do to her? Would she still have a will of her own, if she got that close to it?
Probably not. Right. That meant she had to make a break for it. Take a look at the transmitter eventually, but on her own terms. Preferably from a distance.
‘You’re a first‐generation product of an alien media‐aware culture,’ Compassion recited, sounding as though she hadn’t rehearsed the sentence quite well enough. ‘Apparently, there’s still some useful cultural material in your head. Ideas we’ve lost over the generations. Guest thinks you might be able to add something to the transmissions.’ She shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound very likely to me. But we might as well try it, see what happens.’
‘Right,’ said Sam, nodding wisely. Then she threw herself out of the chair and lunged for the door.
As she’d hoped, Compassion was caught off‐guard. The woman reached for the vial around her neck, but Sam slammed into her shoulder before she could flick it open. Sam let the momentum carry her forward, her body stumbling over the threshold, out into the red light on the other side of the doorway.