Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [96]
SAM: Missing…?
MARK: You know what the scientists say, Sam. They’re saying it even in your time. The universe is only a tenth of the size it’s supposed to be. The mass equations prove it. Missing matter. The lost nine‐tenths of the universe. It’s a prized commodity around here.
SAM: That’s ridiculous! There’s no such thing as missing matter. It’s just… matter you haven’t found yet. You can’t run things on it.
COMPASSION [shrugs]: If you say so.
MARK: Faction technology. It’s a science based on the holes in other people’s science. The holes Rassilon opened. The Cold, the zombie ships…
SAM: I don’t believe a word of it.
MARK: And your science makes sense, I suppose? Do you think one human being in a thousand really knows how a microwave oven works? Or a video? Nobody here asks questions.
COMPASSION: We’re here.
[SAM turns back to COMPASSION. We don’t notice it straight away, but MARK has disappeared from the scene.]
SAM: What do you mean, ‘here’? We haven’t been moving. Have we?
COMPASSION [looking at her strangely]: We haven’t stopped walking in almost an hour.
SAM: Oh. [She shakes her head.] The transmissions. I don’t think I can deal with this for much longer.
COMPASSION: It’ll pass. Once we’re inside the transmitter building.
[Then SAM looks up, and sees the grand spire of the main transmitter, towering above her. It seems to fill up the entire sky, a smooth spike puncturing the clouds, the faces of the Cold rippling as it beams its transmissions into the air.
[SAM hiccups. She just succeeds in stopping herself falling over.
[Abruptly, the REMOTE passers‐by stop screaming, and continue crossing the endless plaza, as if nothing had happened. Immediately, the faces dissolve back into the clouds. Dull red light spreads across Anathema.]
SAM: I think I’m getting better.
COMPASSION: Lucky you.
SAM [still looking up at the transmitter]: This place… d’you keep all your prisoners here?
COMPASSION: We don’t keep prisoners. We’re not that kind of society.
[COMPASSION heads for transmitter building. SAM doesn’t look as though she believes the woman.
[But she follows her anyway.
[Fade out.]
* * *
Travels with Fitz (VI)
Augustine City, 2596
The sky was in pieces. It was like a patchwork, like someone had torn fragments out of all kinds of skies – dark ones, stormy ones, angry ones, boiling ones – and sewn them together, letting them ripple and bubble, streaking the air with lightning as they fought for airspace. There was wind, too, a wind that burnt your face if you turned right into it. Across the planet, the masses were wailing and whining, threatening to lynch the weathermen, as if they were the ones responsible for the catastrophe. And why shouldn’t they be? thought Fitz. That was the religion of the colony. Blame the icon. Kill the image.
All over the city, TV sets were pumping messages of reassurance out into the air; the screens inside the houses, the screens on the streets, the screens that floated over the public plazas were all repeating the same messages, the entire settlement chanting the same words. The city was saying, Do not panic. But the city wasn’t listening to its own advice.
You could hear it even from here, even from the roof of the media tower at the dead centre of the planet’s mass mind. Three hundred storeys up, so you could see all the way to the horizon if you stood on the edge. The roof was flat and tarmac‐black, carved up by fluorescent lines and ringed with infrared marker lights. A private spaceport site, thought Fitz. And now two hundred media employees were standing in a circle around the landing zone, staring up at the heavens, letting the rain burn red‐hot patterns into their eyes. Children of the Faction, all two hundred of them, waiting for salvation to come down from the clouds. According to the family’s inner circle, the sky was burning because it knew, on some level, that the Time Lords were coming. It knew the planet was damned. The atmosphere could feel the ripples, the temporal fallout of an attack that hadn’t even started yet.
Even if the Doctor had