Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [77]
Anathema.
And Sam was looking down on it all.
Looking down.
Her eyes finally settled on another shape, some hundreds of metres away. A floating platform, hanging in the air close to one of the transmitter towers. A disc of transparent plastic, topped by an off‐white dome, although it was impossible to get any idea of scale from here.
A floating platform. A dome on a disc. Sam remembered the shape of the room she’d come from, and slowly, very slowly, her consciousness figured out where she was standing.
She was on another one of the discs. She’d run straight out of the doorway and up to the edge of the platform, and now she was balanced on the brink, her heels on the smooth see‐through surface, her toes treading thin air.
The moment she realised it, her balance went.
She tried swinging her arms. It didn’t help. If anything, it made things worse. Now she was looking down, straight down, past the roadways and walkways, into the sheer black at the bottom of the city. She could see people on the pathways, little multicoloured splodges, none of them looking up, none of them even suspecting that a twenty‐something alien was about to dive‐bomb them from a great height.
In that moment of pure panic, Sam saw the pattern in the buildings underneath her. She found herself thinking of the concentric circles again, the rings around the BBC mast. She could see the same circles now, worked into the architecture, like ripples around the transmitter towers. As if the towers had sent out pulses, and the pulses had hardened into buildings.
Perhaps they had. Over centuries, probably. The towers had sent out their signals, and the people of the Remote had responded, marking out the places where they’d heard the transmissions, until a whole city had developed. No wonder it looked like it had all come out of the same head.
But this hardly seemed important, bearing in mind that she was about to fall to her death several hundred metres below.
Sam’s heels lost their grip on the edge of the platform. She slipped, towards the drop, and she found herself wondering whether there’d be some kind of antigravity device to rescue her, maybe a protective force field around the platform. Somehow, though, that didn’t seem to be the style of the Remote at all.
Just as she slid over the edge, she felt Compassion grab her collar. Sam wasn’t sure exactly what happened next. In retrospect, she seemed to remember thrashing her arms and legs around, searching for something to grab on to. But the next fully conscious memory she had was of sitting by the dome’s doorway, curled up into a ball. Compassion stood nearby, alarmingly close to the edge, with her arms folded.
‘Where were you going?’ Compassion asked.
She wasn’t being sarcastic, Sam realised. She really wanted to know. Sadly, Sam didn’t have a proper answer.
‘This is is Anathema,’ Sam said. ‘This is your home, isn’t it?’
‘We weren’t sure whether we should retrieve you here or back on Earth,’ Compassion told her. ‘We decided you could probably do less damage here. And obviously, this is where the main transmitter is.’
‘How did I get here from the Cold? Is it some kind of transmat?’
Compassion looked confused, but only for a moment. ‘We thought you were from Earth,’ she said. ‘You’re not supposed to have transmats on Earth. Not in the twentieth century.’
‘We don’t. But we’ve got science fiction.’
‘Oh.’
‘Am I still in my own time? I mean, is this still 1996?’
Compassion nodded. ‘We can’t time travel. We haven’t been able to for two hundred years. Didn’t Kode tell you?’
Sam stood, then risked another look out across the city. The shadows were still rippling over the buildings, making her feel slightly ill. Of course, her stomach still thought it was dangling off the edge of the platform, so that wasn’t surprising. A particularly heavy shadow passed overhead, and Sam looked up, just in time to see something flat, black and triangular move across the sky. There were more of the shapes up in the clouds, circling like vultures.
‘Ships?’ she asked.
‘Obviously,’ said Compassion.