Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [78]
Sam studied the cityscape again. Now she was looking for them, she could see plenty of moving things. Vehicles that hovered between buildings, floating discs that transported the tiny speck‐inhabitants from one part of Anathema to another. Sam thought of those old SF magazines from the 1940s, where the artists predicted what life would be like in the year 1990 by painting flying cars and jet parks all over the place. The Remote had been Earth colonists once, the voice in the Cold had told her. Well, that made sense. Anathema looked like a computerised, smoothed‐down model of a colony planet. A great big Scalextric set that people could live in.
But the black ships were different. Not like the other vehicles. Big. Predatory. Scary.
‘They’re fighters,’ Sam concluded. ‘Why do you need fighters over your city?’
Clearly, Compassion didn’t really understand the question. ‘They’re ours,’ she said. ‘Part of Anathema.’
‘Yeah, but what are they for? Who are they fighting?’
‘“Fighting”?’
Sam clenched her teeth. ‘If you’ve got fighters, they must be fighting something. Or getting ready to fight something. What I’m asking is –’
She never finished the question. It didn’t seem worth the bother. There was a great wave of noise from somewhere off on the horizon, a plume of fire erupting out of the guts of the city and leaping at least two hundred metres into the air. Sam watched the flame scrape the sky, burning a hole in the clouds. There were triangular ships circling the area of the explosion, nothing more than seagull shapes in the distance. After a while, the flames died down. The ships seemed to get bored, and drifted away.
‘Let’s go back inside,’ said Compassion.
* * *
Sam didn’t sit down. She didn’t trust the plastic chair, even if it didn’t immediately seem to be fitted with any arm clamps. Instead, she circled the dome, inspecting the hardware. Not that she was likely to learn anything about it that way, but she felt she had to make an effort.
Compassion opened up a panel in the dome’s interior wall, the surface sliding to one side at her touch, and revealing a set of cute multicoloured controls behind the grey. The control panel was a mess, like everything else in Anathema, but an incredibly well‐ordered mess. The woman seemed to be punching a series of commands into a keypad, although for all Sam knew she could have been pressing buttons just for a laugh.
‘That explosion,’ Sam prompted.
‘What about it?’ murmured Compassion.
‘Those fighters. You said they were yours. So why are they attacking the city?’
Compassion stopped punching, and looked over her shoulder. Her eyebrows were knotted together in the middle of her face. ‘Because that’s what they do. Obviously.’
‘Stop saying “obviously”. Nothing here’s obvious.’
‘Isn’t it?’
‘Not to me. Where I come from, the military don’t generally blow up their own territory. Not deliberately, anyhow.’
‘Only because they don’t have to. Where you come from, there’s more than one nation‐state, isn’t there? More than one cultural objective. You can have wars.’
‘You’re jealous of that? That we can fight each other?’
Now Compassion looked really confused. ‘Of course not. Wars are pointless. Uncontrollable. Our way’s much better.’
‘Just blowing up your own people every now and then, you mean?’
‘What the fighters do is their business. Besides, the buildings that got blown up may not have been inhabited, for all we know. There are plenty of unoccupied areas in the city. There aren’t more than a couple of thousand of us, remember.’
Sam wondered how she was supposed to remember something she’d never been told. Clearly, this was turning out to be one of those Alice‐in‐Wonderland days. ‘But the buildings may have been inhabited. People may have been killed.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘And you don’t care about that? It doesn’t bother you?’
Compassion sighed, and turned to face Sam head‐on. ‘I thought we’d cleared this up this back on Earth. When you had the receiver pinned to your neck. You can’t care about every single one of your people, you’d go mad. You can only care about the